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Water-Cooled Laptops From Toshiba 145

Posted by Hemos from the keepin'-it-cool dept.
dan the person writes: "Toshiba's latest 0.75 inch thick laptop features a watercooled processor. Watercooling is no longer just for hardcore overclockers. " Not many details along with this - if you know more, please post links below.
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Water-Cooled Laptops From Toshiba More

Water-Cooled Laptops From Toshiba

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  • I AM FREE (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hello my fellow humans,

    I am Free.

    Thanks,

    Kevin Mitnik
  • Watercooling CPUs is yet another kluge (the former being the fan, and before that rose sized heat sinks) to get around the problem of BAD CPU DESIGN. Crusoe proves that CPUs can be both fast AND cool. Intel is just too lazy to dump the nearly 20 year old basic core design of their x86 architecture which was never intended to run at 1GHz. It's like if your car needed a radiator up front 10 feet wide and 3 feet high with an additional radiator mounted above the driver cab all with high speed fan forced cooling and high current peltier devices bolted all over the engine block. Would you not think that maybe, just maybe something was wrong with the engine design instead, or would you just accept this as a normal cooling requirement (like we do with CPUs)?
  • Also I would like to know how they combat the problem with external air that may concentrate into water on the internals of the laptop.

    That shouldn't be a problem, at least not more so than with any laptop today. You won't have water condensing anywhere because no part of the laptop should be cooler than room temperature. The water goes past the CPU, gets heated, and then goes through the case, cooling to room temperature. Nowhere does it cool enough to cause condensation from room air.


    --Phil (I'd still like a Crusoe laptop, though.)
  • Hmm... the URL for the specs appears to be down.
    Does anyone have a copy somewhere?
  • It was a bad idea when they did it to cars, and it's a bad idea now that they're doing it to computers.

    Can you say "power consumption"?

    It's nice when Intel pushes standards for low power consumption that covers every 3rd-party manufactured component in a machine, but the least green part of any computer is the power-sucking heat dissipating, and now water-pumping CPU. What's next, liquid Nitrogen?

    How about intelligent CPU design?

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • At last a computer I can use in the shower!!
  • The NeXT slabs and cubes had Mg cases. At some point in the infancy of the web, someone had taken a slab, torched it and put the movie up on the web. The case burned quite nicely too. IIRC, it took a blow torch to get the case blazing.

  • such as Colombian. Which I probably spelt wrong

    Know, ewe spelled it write. :-)

    At one job once, an coworker called in to the IS department and asked if her computer could be leaking. (There was a puddle of water on the floor.) We laughed our heads off over that one. Now, it could be coming true.

  • I remember an article mentioning that DEC had a "cooling tower" prototyped for the Alpha. A short tower filled with a non-water fluid. I don't think it ever made it past the prototype stage, at least I never heard about it again.
  • "Folgers Inside"?
  • ... that I read of which had been linked to from one of the recent overclocking stories. Some guy had submerged his entire motherboard in mineral oil to keep the whole thing cool. It worked because the mineral oil does not conduct electricity. Cool, huh? Though I can't imagine the mess it could make...


    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  • True dat...I don't know how they would deal with that. Possibly some type of foam inside the heat sink (would prevent sloshing of stuff too). I think short of upside down, the hot water vapor would still tend to move away from the processor...hmm hmm hmm...

    -Ryan
  • Water vapor makes good sense. This is exactly how cars work. Do you think that water/antifreeze in your radiator would stay liquid if you opened the cap on the expressway? Heck, if you opened it in your driveway after driving, you would witness "water vapor cooling" your skin as it cooked it.

    Anyway, what it probably does is use the hot stuff rises principal. They used this in the Model T Fords. No water pumps on those babies; they didn't need em. They don't need them on these laptops either. All you have to do is put your radiator physically above the processor, and the hot vapor will rise into the radiator or whatever disipator they are using, then condense and sink back to the processor to repeat.

    Dig it,
    Ryan
  • Can you point me to some documentation or specs on the Dell system? I'd love to read about it... if only to know what I'm carrying around in my laptop.

    --Jim

  • So LCD power use is a function of area, not resolution?

    Well, you can think of it two ways:

    1) The higher the resolution, the greater the number of transistors used (as almost all LCDs these days are active-matrix), thereby increasing the power consumption.

    2) The larger the area of the screen, the larger the backlight needs to be (try using a large LCD indoors for an hour without a backlight; your eyes will bleed ;), thereby increasing the power consumption.

    Which do you think would be the bigger drain? I'm betting on (2), but I'm open to more informed opinions...


  • The 3440 [toshiba.co.jp] has already been released in Japan.

    OK, the page is in Japanese, but you can still look at the pretty pictures...

  • Java Powered?
  • Nono... you're at the wrong news site... go to News for Druggies for that sort of thing...
    You mean here [hashdot.org]?
  • As to capillary limits, remember, giant redwoods run by capillary action.

    I don't see why you'd have to have a 10 meter limit.
  • Actually not, Ryan. The water/antifreeze in your radiator does stay liquid in your car. That's precisely the reason it's under pressure, so it stays that way.

    A real problem in high performance engines is the growth of steam bubbles. Once a steam bubble forms, it insulates the combustion chamber from other coolant, and the temp in that cylinder soars. This leads to catastrophic detonation, bent valves and holes burned in pistons.

    Yes, in theory, it would be wonderfully efficient to use phase changes to cool an engine, but in practice, it doesn't seem to work.

    On the other hand, this use of heat pipes is interesting. Building race cars is part of the family business, and I'm going to look into it.
  • From reading the article, (which is admittedly a bit skimpy on details) it seems like they are using the magnesium case as a big heat sink by moving the CPU heat to the case for dissipation via the water-cooling system. I don't know about you, but my old, slow p133 laptop gets REALLY REALLY hot even without specifically routing the heat to the external case. And I know that my desktop processor gets so hot I can't touch it until it has had a bit to cool down. Does this mean if I leave my new toshiba turned on long enough that the (metal) case will reach processor-level temperatures? I don't want to have to wear my asbestos pants just to use a laptop!
  • Hey, if its so hot it can't be a lap top (good for artic expeditions though.. keep the tent warm.)

    I think apple tried this earlier with a combustable battery in the lap top. If memory serves it didn' t sell well.

    My company just got through ripping out the water cooling system for the mainfraims because the new mainframes don't need it.I always wondered what was under that raised floor. .CMOS is a wonderfull thing..
  • This post is not "flamebait". It is "insightful" and "interesting" (not to mention "underrated").

    In fact, I nearly posted the same thing myself, but I figured others would have already. When chips get too hot because they are running at 20 watts, the solution is not "add points of failure and weight with a water-coolant system". The solution is "use fewer watts". Crusoe uses 1 watt. The solution exists. We have the technology.
    --
  • The spec sheet says it'll get 2.5 hours on a charge for the regular battery, 8.5 on the Lithium battery (which, BTW, is HUGE!). But if you're running a motor to circulate the colling fluid (doesn't have to be H2O, that's what they're using for this, however), motors chew up battery life. Convection currents won't be strong enough in this application to eliminate the need for a motor, and *some* movement of the vapor is needed to efficiently disperse the heat.

    Note to those talking about "leaking" and such - it's "low-pressure water vapor" - yes, I'm sure there is condensed water in there, but most of it is vapor, not liquid form. You'd be hard-pressed to get anything useful out of it if you cracked it open in the desert looking for a drink.
  • nobody said Toshiba invented watercooling. And not many people in this country consider audio amps a "laptop".
  • Get a login so you won't have to post AC anymore. :)
  • Back about 93 or 94 I was working on parallel processing systems, and Parsytec did us a demo of their new modular transputer box. It came in two models, water cooled and (IIRC) freon cooled. The water cooling was done using heat pipes like those mentioned by other posters, but the mechanism seems slightly different.

    The ones I saw (the Parsytec guy had one of the heat pipes in his pocket he'd use for demos) relied on liquid water depressurised so that its boiling point was the desired running temp. The heat was dissipated by vaporizing the water (i.e. taking up a lot of energy to change the temperature of the water, as it becomes steam - much more than it would take to heat either water or steam). One end of the pipe was at the T8 and the other was in the air duct.

    The pipes themselves were about the size of a slim pen, made of some metal, and (obviously) sealed. To demonstrate them in action, the guy stirred his hot coffee with it, then blew across the top - the coffee became tepid. Pretty cool stuff (if you'll pardon the pun).

    I only mention this because other posters seem to be talking about pure-vapour or pure-liquid pipes.
  • Doh! Shouldve read some more comments, there are a few very informative ones up there which describe exactly what I saw.

  • Yeah, but this isn't a fridge. The principle in cooling is just making a fluid evaporate as this is an energy demanding process. Whether you use water or some coolant doesn't matter. A fridge doesn't use a CPU to accomplish this (Gee!) , it uses a motor and some coolant gas instad of water. How often do you really replace the coolant in the fridge? You don't. As for keeping external air from condensing, I guess they have a fan.

  • Ever seen a distillation column? Methinks it's the same principle. Lead the water past the hot CPU, water evaporates - perhaps to another system of tubes. When away from the CPU, vapor condenses back to water and reenters the first system. My bet is that the Toshiba guys know better than making an open system, ie. a system where the amount of water isn't constant. You do not want people to refill their PC's.
  • Nono... you're at the wrong news site... go to News for Druggies for that sort of thing...
  • Did anybody stop to think that maybe this *isn't* water cooled. Reporters have been known to be wrong before. I just can't believe that with all the other 500mhz systems out there that none of them have any real problems... what exactly makes this notebook so special. And since when is water cooling smaller than a fan?
  • Yeah, Crusoe is a *much* neater solution, you don;t make laptops smaller & cheaper by trying to squeeze in even more stuff. But how much faster would a cooled Crusoe be?

    Oh yeah, we had a water cooled laptop ages ago, but it didn't work even after we sloshed all the mud out of the case. Maybe we could have a dedicated Cola intake on computers to divert coke away from the tty?

    X
  • True the x86 architecture is not designed to go this fast and Ishouldn't have to live with half of my case devoted to heatsinks and fans.

    But it is not because Intel is lazy that we are stuck with x86. Intel can't change it, what is the point of releasing a new architecture if no OS is going to run on it?

    True Linux and other Unices would be ported quickly, but no matter what we think we are not the most important customers to Intel. How long do you think before M$ gets around to porting windows to the new architecture? 10, 20 years?

    In fact Intel and AMD have both already tried to bring out new architectureswith their new cpu lines.

  • Check out the new libretto at Japan Palmtop Direct [jpd.com]. It might have japanese characters as well as english characters on the keys, but it is a lot more advanced than the old librettos.
  • The press release mentioned the term "heat pipe" in passing.

    A heat pipe is a really interesting device for transfering heat from one point to another. The way they work is by containing some fluid and vapor at near the vaporization pressure for that fluid. The pipe is sealed permanently -- no chance for a leak unless the device is breached. Usually the pipe is arranged more or less vertically, so that fluid flows to the bottom (where the heat source is), boils (sucking heat out of the heat source in the process), vapor flows up the pipe to the top, where it condenses (releasing heat to the cooler part of the system), and the resulting fluid runs down to collect at the bottom once more, completing the circuit. No moving parts at all. And they are amazingly fast at managing this heat transfer.

    \begin(wild speculation)

    One wonders if the cooling unit mentioned is really a heat pipe. The problem with this is that a heat pipe needs to have a gravity assist to work correctly. The hot part has to be at the bottom of the pipe. If you could manage this, however, you could cool the CPU for nearly nothing, in terms of additional energy input for fans and the like. and you could easily transfer the heat from the concentrated point on the CPU, to a more dispersed area around the case.

    Did I mention the gravity requirement? If the machine were tipped the wrong way, you'd immediately loose your cooling system altogether.

    \end(wild speculation)

    I have *no* idea if this is correct or not. One cannot trust a press release to get details like this right.
  • It won't be too long before we see college students make a combination bong/processor coolant system. Kids will be taking Athlon hits.
  • So LCD power use is a function of area, not resolution?

    Cool!


    Hey laptop guys! Make mine a strongarm w/ a 1280x1024 12" display. And make it light and thin too. I'll even pay through the nose for the pleasure.
  • These were most fun when they sprung a leak as, one id to me @ ~2:00a ... spatks flew and the power shut down ... It was more fun than "EMERGENCY PULL".... but then I date myself...
  • the URL for the specs appears to be down.

    It still works for me, even after I dumped my cache.

    Just in case, here is they are in plain text:
    -=-=-=-=-=-=

    TOSHIBA Product Highlights
    Ultra-portability -.8" thin and 3.4 lbs. light
    Performance - Intel Mobile Pentium III processor Expansion Flexibility and Connectivity

    Over 2.5 hours battery life with main battery and approximately 8.5 hours battery life with the
    addition of the high capacity battery 11. 3" Polysilicon display - Screaming multimedia
    performance

    Product Specifications
    Processors Intel® Mobile Pentium® III processor:
    500MHz (1.35V);
    With 256KB Level 2 cache integrated on die Integrated co-processor

    32KB internal cache Data/ Address Bus Width: 64-bit/ 32-bit
    100MHz Front Side Bus
    Memory Type: 64/ 128 Mbit PC100 SDRAM, 3.3V, 100MHz

    Capacity: 64MB on board, expandable to 192MB One available memory slot (for use with 64MB or
    128MB memory module)
    BIOS APM V1. 2; ACPI V1. 0b; PnP V1. 0a; VESA V2. 0;

    DPMS; DDC2B; SM Bios V2. 3, PCI BIOS V2. 1
    System Architecture PCI Bus V2. 2: Intel 440MX System Chipset

    Hard Disk 6. 0 billion byte Supports PIO Mode 4;
    Supports Ultra DMA Mode 2, Supports Multiword DMA mode 2
    Accommodates 9.5mm height, 2.5" hard drive 12 ms average access time
    Enhanced IDE (ATA-4); Service removable
    External Floppy Diskette Drive USB, 3.5", 1.44MB

    Video S3 Savage IX graphics controller
    8MB SGRAM Internal Video Memory 128-bit BitBLT engine, Direct3D support, 33MHz
    Video Ports SVGA
    Display Polysilicon TFT Active Matrix Color LCD
    11.3" diagonal: up to 16 million colors at 1024 x 768 resolution
    External Color Support 16M colors:
    1024x768, 800x600, 640x480 @ 60/ 75/ 85Hz Non-Interlaced, simultaneous
    mode 64K colors:
    1024x768, 800x600, 640x480 @60/ 75/ 85Hz Non-Interlaced, simultaneous
    mode 1280x1024
    @60/ 75Hz Non-Interlaced, simultaneous mode
    256 colors: 1024x768, 800x600, 640x480
    @60/ 75/ 85Hz Non-Interlaced, simultaneous mode
    1280x1024 @60/ 75Hz Non-Interlaced, simultaneous mode

    Audio YAMAHA YMF752, 16-bit stereo
    Compatibility: Windows Sound System V2. 0 and Sound Blaster Pro compatible
    MIDI playback 3D sound support
    Direct Sound, Direct 3D Sound, Direct Music, Full duplex sound support, 64 voices,
    Headphone port External mic port
    Built-in speaker Built-in mic

    Communications Integrated V. 90 data + fax modem (56K data, 14.4K
    fax) Supports ring wake-up resume
    RJ-11 modem port Keyboard
    85 keys with 12 function keys 2 mm key stroke
    Dedicated Windows® key

    Integrated AccuPoint II(TM) pointing device, scroll function - programmable
    Expansion Two PC Card slots support two Type II or one Type III
    PC Cards; Supports: PCMCIA R2. 01, PC Card 16, CardBus
    One expansion memory slot available (for use with 64MB or 128MB memory module)
    SVGA video port Fast infrared port (4Mbps, IrDA V1. 1 compliant)
    Universal Serial Bus (USB) port RJ-11 modem port
    LAN Port Replicator bundled with system Serial PCI port -for use with LAN Port Replicator, I/ O
    Adapter, and Multi-Media Port Replicator
    Dimensions (WxDxH) 10.3" x 9.1" x 0.8" - thickness may vary at certain points on the system
    Weight 3. 4 lbs (With main 6-cell battery)

    Power Supply 45W External AC Adapter
    100-240V input voltage 50-60Hz frequency
    4.9" W x 2.5" D x 1.0" H, .7 lbs. Battery
    Rechargeable, removable Lithium Ion battery (10.8V, 3000mAh)
    2.8 hours battery life 3 hours recharge time (off)
    ACPI V1. 0b support Battery life may vary depending on applications,
    power management settings and features utilized. Recharge time varies depending on usage.

    System Management SM V2. 3 BIOS support with asset tag capability
    ACPI V1. 0b power management Toshiba Configuration Builder CD

    Security Power-on password
    HDD access password Keyboard lock
    CPU Serial Number Security (Using SVPW utility) Setup Security (Using SVPW utility)
    Screen Blank) Main system memory, modem, and internal HDD
    security screws included Cable lock slot

    Software Microsoft® Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 SP5,
    Windows 98SE, Windows 95 AT& T WorldNet Services -95/ 98SE
    Customizable Toshiba/ My Yahoo! Start page -98SE Microsoft Internet Explorer -95/ 98SE/ NT4.0/ 2000
    Puma IntelliSync 97 -NT4. 0 and Win95 only RingCentral -Windows 95 & Win98SE only
    Toshiba custom utilities -95/ 98SE/ NT4. 0/ 2000 YAMAHA YMF744B Audio -95/ 98SE/ NT4.0/ 2000
    Electronic User Guide -98SE/ 2000
    Warranty 1 year parts and labor

    1 year battery
    Environmental Specifications Temperature:

    Operating: 5 O to 35 O C (41 O to 95 O F) Non-operating: -20 O to 65 O C (-4 O to 149 O F)
    Thermal gradient: Operating: 15 O C per hour maximum
    Non-operating: 20 O C per hour maximum Relative Humidity:
    Operating: 20% to 80% non-condensing Non-operating: 10% to 90% non-condensing
    Altitude (relative to sea level): Operating: -60m to 3,000m (-197' to 9,842')
    Non-operating: -60m to 10,000m (-197' to 32,808') Shock:
    Operating: 10G Non-operating: 60G
    Vibration: Operating: 0.5G
    Non-operating: 1G
    Featured Configurations PP344U-2PU82

    PIII-500/ 11.3/ 64MB/ 6GB/ Mdm/ Win98/ 95 PP344U-2PU86
    PIII-500/ 11.3/ 64MB/ 6GB/ Mdm/ Win2K/ NT

    Accessories PA3012U 6GB HDD for use with
    Multimedia Port Replicator PA3027U 12GB HDD for use with
    Multimedia Port Replicator PA3029U 18GB HDD for use with
    Multimedia Port Replicator PA3020U HDD Adapter
    PA3015U CD-ROM Drive for use with Multimedia Port Replicator
    PA3014U DVD Drive for use with Multimedia Port Replicator
    PA3043U-1FDD USB Floppy Disk Drive PA3041U-1PRP I/ O Adapter (Port Replicator)
    PA3040U-1PRP LAN Port Replicator PA3042U-1DST Multimedia Port Replicator
    PA3035U-1ACA AC Adapter PA3038U-1BRL Main Battery
    PA3039U-1BRL High Capacity Battery KTT-MD100/ 64 Kingston 64MB Memory
    KTT-MD100/ 128 Kingston 128MB Memory NWCC30130 Port-Noteworthy Portege Slimcase

    * Hard disk drive: 1GB = 1BB 1
  • It doesn't have to be that strong, just stronger than the other components . . . if you've cracked your LCD or broken some other component into bits already, who cares if the coolant leaks?
  • Not mineral oil - fluorinert. Costs about $18 for a 5 gallon container. Does not corrode, conduct electricity, and it absorbs heat 12 times better than water. I'm actually trying to get some startup capitol to mass manufacture some cases for full submersion of computers in flourinert. Well, there are other options other than fluorinert. 3M makes several dielectric chemicals like it. Check out their Specialty Fluids [3m.com] website for information on lots of flourinated chemicals, or check out Flourinert directly. [3m.com]
  • A friend of mine who owns a Japanese Dreamcast told me that it is water cooled.

    Dana
  • Nope... there's water in there. Dell has been doing this for years... I was kind of surprised to see the article not mention this. - overflow
  • They used water/ethylene glycol for two reasons; It reduced corrosion, and in event of a power failure would prevent the exchangers from freezing and bursting.
  • Yeah - and unless I miss my guess, the engines themselves are exchangable.

    One of my future projects is to buy an old vw microbus and swap in a high end porsche engine...

    Surprise the heck out of people when the light turns red...
  • Its pure water, heat pipes can stand being frozen. Alcohol is not added, you would start distilling the alcohol, and end up with a poorly perfoming heat pipe.
    The heat pipe can stand being frozen, if there is no way for the water to accumulate in a slug in one place. However, the CPU can't operate if the ambient temperature is below freezing. The vapor would freeze upon reaching the cold case. Ice cannot flow back to the heat source, and the result would be a CPU running without any cooling. A shot of alcohol would prevent freezing.

    One way to eliminate this problem is to use another working fluid, like pure ethanol or even butane. A charge of butane equal to the contents of a cigarette lighter should be sufficient for a laptop-sized heat pipe.
    --

  • You wouldn't pour hot Pentiums down your pants? <g>

    Don't worry. The reason the CPU gets so hot is because it doesn't dissipate heat to a large sink, such as the case. The larger the dissipating area, the smaller the thermal resistance and the lower the temperature rise over ambient. If you understand elementary electronics, think of the CPU as a current source; it generates a given amount of heat, regardless. If this "current" (heat flow) goes to "ground" (the environment) through a high resistance, it will create a high voltage (temperature); if you give it a low resistance, it will only build up a low voltage (temperature). Look up thermal resistance, you'll find it's rated in terms of temperature per unit of power. The analogy to electric resistance (ohms = volts per amp) is dead-on.

    Yes, I'm a physics nut, why?
    --

  • Convection can occur in a single phase of a material (gas or liquid). Heat pipes use phase change to move heat; the vapor phase is produced from liquid at the heat source, and the liquid phase travels back to the source from the sink by gravity or capillary action. This is vastly more efficient than conduction, because the amount of heat moved per unit of mass is enormous (about 2500 joules per gram of water at these temperatures, IIRC) and only tiny pressure differences are required to drive the fluid flows. This leads to huge reductions in the thermal resistance and much lower temperature rise of the CPU over ambient. It also appears to get rid of the need for a fan, which eliminates noise and power drain. All around, it's very elegant. (If I'm not mistaken, heat pipes were a NASA invention.)
    --
  • Water will boil quite nicely at any temperature down to the triple point, as long as it's the only material in the system. Below 100 C, this means the heat pipe must operate under vacuum (you knew these things were sealed, right?). While pure water would work, I would not be surprised if the actual fluid in the pipe doesn't have some alcohol in it to protect the heat pipe itself from freeze damage.

    If this is so, it means you could crack open your CPU cooling system when you ran out of vodka.
    --

  • Glycol is used in coolant loops between chillers (basically, air-conditioners which cool a liquid instead of air) and the devices to be cooled. This allows the chillers to be mounted quite some distance away. This is a good thing; the last thing you'd want in your computer room is a huge compressor, and the plumbing for refrigerant lines is more trouble-prone (not to mention ozone-hostile) than glycol. Why glycol? Because the chillers work close to freezing, and it won't do to have the system plug up with ice and stop working.
    --
  • Convection currents won't be strong enough in this application to eliminate the need for a motor, and *some* movement of the vapor is needed to efficiently disperse the heat.
    There you'd be wrong. To dissipate 22 watts under those conditions, you only need to move about half a gram of water vapor a minute. This requires a very small pressure difference between two parts of the system, and that is easily created by the difference in temperature (and thus vapor pressure) between the CPU cooling plate and the case. (Look up some steam tables if you have questions about this.) Capillary forces (such as exist in a wick or corrugated tube walls) will pull the liquid back from the heat sink, again without any motors required. Heat pipes have been working on satellites for decades now, and nobody puts a motor on a satellite if it's not absolutely necessary. Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a mechanic out there?
    --
  • The real question is: why would anyone want top performance in a laptop? The damn things are supposed to be reliable and portable, not able to outperform a workstation!

    Speaking as a person who recently used Other People's Money to buy a P3-500 laptop, some of us are greedy bastards who want the power of a Cray and three years of battery life in an adamantium-strength package which weighs a single kilo. Oh, and it had better come with drivers for every OS ever.

    I see no reason why portability must entail loss of power; you just pay more to buy the "portable" option.
  • Wow... I remember all my chemistry labs where we burned Magnesium... I wonder how much of a fire hazard those things are.
  • Yeah, Crusoe running at 700Mhz is only as fast as a PII at 450 or so. Still way more power than you need to do a presentation with PowerPoint. How much processing power do you think it takes to blit the screen with a new slide, even with the fancy transition effects you don't use even a fraction of that processer power you are paying for with battery life.

    Also, your wording is interesting: Slow and long, fast but shorter.
    Perhaps more accuratly: Unnoticably slower and several hours of work, or uselessly faster and only a little over an hour worth of work (but you can fry eggs on it while you are working!).
    It's your decision.
  • Great, a new thin laptop from Toshiba. But it's still full size in the other dimensions. I'm looking for a replacement for my aging Libretto, but Toshiba don't seem interested in bringing out new models with a Libretto-like form factor any more. The only other alternative at the moment is the smaller Sony Vaio models, which I don't like as much, and don't exactly have a stellar spec anyway, particularly for the price. Sigh. I hate the non-upgradability of laptops. I've put a 6GB disk in the Libretto, but the CPU is soldered directly to the motherboard, and I'm at the maximum memory it'll handle already :-(
  • What's the copper pipe in Dell Latitude containing? Is it just a thermal conductor.

    I wondered the same thing about the cooling system in my Dell Inspiron 3700 [jimthompson.org]. I looked on Dell's site for some detailed technical specs or white papers, but came up empty. My speculation is that it's just air (in which case, you probably move more heat by conduction through the copper pipe). Water would be more effective, but you'd have to ensure that the thing didn't leak. But air might be enough -- you don't have to pipe away all the heat from the CPU, just enough to keep it within tolerance.

    Whatever it is, it seems effective. When the fan comes on, the exhaust air is very warm.

    --Jim
  • Portege notebooks (I'm typing this on a 3010 right now) are magnesium. They are using the water cooling system to tramsit the heat to the case.

    naturally, if you spread the heat out over a larger area, it dissipates better and doesn't make any one part of the case hot.

    The 3010 I'm using right now is a far cry from the new one, uses a 266mhz mobile pentium mmx. It gets a little warm, but i wouldn't say hot.

    But really, who needs even the cpu in that thing? I'll keep this portege 3010 until I can get something of equal weight that gives me longer battery life, even if it's the same speed or only a little faster.

    Yes, I'm anxious to see a Transmeta based ultraportable, but not because i wan to buy one. I'm anxious because I'll believe the hype when i can talk to someone who's owned one for six months, and then maybe I'll be able to decide if it would be better than what I'm using now.

  • Since people were talking about this thing being similar to the cooling in the Dreamcast, I went and looked around for info on that.

    Here is a nice page with a great picture of the Dreamcast cooling system [demon.co.uk].

    If the Dreamcast liquid cooling system is similar to the one in the 3440CT, you can see why they might want it: it is flat. The 3440 itself is really, really thin. (There are pictures of it on Toshiba's site.)

  • I was under the impression that the Hitachi processor in the Dreamcast was water cooled. IIRC, it was supposed to be prototype only, but the one I have (European, so it would be the third or so revision of the system) it seems to make a sound indicative of an internal watercooler when I switch it on.
  • I hope more companies will see the light and produce StrongARM and Crusoe based Laptops. Those chips use much less power and run Linux, so what more do you need?

    Windows support for the other 99% of the world.
  • The cooling units on water-cooled mainframes I have worked with were *not* portable. Water was pumped around to a cooling unit and back again in a closed circuit. I think the circuit did need topping up occasionally, though.

    The whole unit weighed the best part of a ton. There were two independent circuits in case one fell out.

  • Hooray! (Score:2)

    by / ( 33804 )
    Maybe this technology will see a return to the old practice of congregating around the water cooler/bubbler/whatever-regional-word-you-use, which has been so neglected in recent years with people wasting their time on the internet instead. Heavens knows, if you have to refill this thing, it won't be with tap water, and while geeks tend to stop being cheap when it comes to buying/maintaining computer hardware, it's just not as sexy to have to pick up distilled water from the grocery store.
  • What if the laptop isn't used in the conventional position?

    I've certainly spent time curled up with a laptop balanced on my knees, which would make up sideways.

  • I used to work in a bank with watercooled IBM mainframes. One day there was a catastrophic system failure which turned out to be caused by a plumber working in the mens washrooms. No prizes for guessing which stopcock he turned off by mistake...
  • While it would be cool to have a computer that would realy sizzle the real problem with beter/faster/hotter is that the heat has to go somewhere. I've got an old Sparc Tadpole 1 laptop. When its sleeping in charge mode it stays warm enough to for the cat to consider it a bed. When its running you can use the thing has a battery operated camp stove and I don't ever run it at full speed. It sounds like some of the new devices will need to come with a warning sticker "Warning Contents Hot -- Do not remove the lid"...oh wait thats just for coffee

  • I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to these machines that happened to IBM's water-cooled mainframes.

    The machines themselves would become obsolete but the cooling mechanism started becoming extremely valuable, sometimes to the point of costing more then the original machine. To keep older machines running after IBM discontinued the line mainframe owners would start searching for old machines to salvage the water-cooling parts. I believe I read that those parts had a very strong auction market for them.

    Evidently water-cooling isn't very cost efficient compared to other ways of increasing CPU output. What they are doing now is shrinking the circuits but we already know that Intel can't keep doing that forever. What else is left to squeeze more power out of a given CPU design besides cooling?

    My question is, how is the water-vapor circulated around the case and what happens if there is a leak?

    Mith
  • I maintain that your original statement was ludicrous.

    I give all my presenations on an old 166mhz thinkpad. Compiling the program in a presentation??? Nobody ever wants to see that, and why would they? Can you explain why a Crusoe that performs as fast as a PIII 500 is not good enough for playing a quicktime movie or a simple PowerPoint animation? I'd say the examples you cite, including compiling, comprise the most processor-intensive segment of the stuff I do at work, yet it all works just fine on my workstations and laptops that run about half as fast as the Crusoe.

    -JD
  • Most people don't have computers based on a vaporware processor, however.

    I don't know what you call vaporware. The term is popularly defined as a product which has been publicly announced, but not implemented, tested or released.

    Transmeta's Crusoe is the opposite of vaporware, since they specifically did not publicize it until they had a working product.

    -JD
  • I remember that was the coolant of choice for IBM mainframes in the '80s. Although that might have been just for the loop to the rooftop heat exchanger, it seems like it had some properties that improved the amount of heat transferred.
  • From what I understand and have been told this uses almost the exact same method as the Sega Dreamcast. In fact, it has been rumored that it is possible to remove the watercooling system from the dreamcast and install it in one of the larger Toshiba laptops with a bit of hackery. But I've never seen it done, so I have my doubts.

    Kintanon
  • No it would just have better uptime. :)
  • <a href=http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/press _release/04172000_3.jsp>Click Here For More Info</a>
  • Wow ! now there is something else you can blaim when you spill the coffee/jolt/coke on the keyboard and it fries the motherboard/cpu !

  • Actually the heat pipe on the Dell contains distilled water - Dell first used it on the Latitude CP (early '98 if I remember correctly). I do not know if that is mentioned anywhere on the website, but I was a tech for Dell when the system came out.

  • Here are some links that might be useful:

    Press Release for the 3440CT [toshiba.com]

    Press Release about the cooling technology [toshiba.com]

    meisenst
  • I think the Cray 2 wins the prize for the most effort required in cooling a commercially available system

    The entire system was filled with fluorinert, which was pumped around the processor boards to cool them. The fluorinert got so hot it needed to be cooled by water, which was done in an external heat-exchanger. The water was then cooled by air, pumped into yet another heat-exchanger. The air was often cooled by separate air-con systems.

    Quite often, the installation cost more than the machine itself!
  • Crusoe is also slower. Everything is based on tradeoffs. What do you want? Slow and long, fast but shorter.

    Business laptops today need high performance power to do presentations through a video projector. These will probably be plugged into a wall jack, so battery life won't be as big a factor in that.

    The solution is not to use slower technology.

    Mike DeMaria
  • Yes, I understand about distillation column, how else will I make home booz exactly? But even in the fridges you have to add freon or some other gases for it to continue working. I don't know if the guys who build laptops are better at this than the guys who build fridges but some evaporation is going to happen. Also I would like to know how they combat the problem with external air that may concentrate into water on the internals of the laptop. This wouldn't be good for CPU or your harddrive (or anything else there.) It's going to be an interesting experiment. I'll wait buying anything like that in a laptop for a while.
  • So it's low pressure water vapor. Does anyone know how this works, is it that the CPU and other devices basically evaporate water from containers by heating them up? Then over time, when there is too much heat, wouldn't the pressure change? To keep the pressure constant wouldn't they have to release some vapor from the laptop? Imagine, a laptop with a whistle:
    -I can hear your kettle whistling.
    -Oh, no, it's just my Toshiba laptop.
    -More tea?

    And do they have to add liquids to the laptop over time or they will never really evaporate into air?

    So many questions and a short life.
  • I don't know if they still have it, but they used to. The Brick, it was really a computer, used to have a heat conductive gel pack inside to conduct the heat to the case without using a fan. Why have they not used this along with the case as a heat sink? Then a fan for additional cooling?

  • Look around you. Who buys laptops or PDAs?:
    Joe Sixpack with Quake in one hand and a NiMH /LiIon battery pack in the other
    Chris Corporate with his suit, briefcase, and hard disk full of word documents, emails, and presentations

    You are omitting a large segment of the notebook-using population: engineers and scientists, who need serious computer power while on the road.

    I've gone to the field for many a test and seen a veritable forest of high-power laptops in a small room in the middle of some godforsaken desert; as often as not, these notebook computers have large screens, running at very high resolutions. Myself, I need to do CAD, run various engineering and simulation software packages, and produce presentation packages and reports while using many apps simultaneously; I therefore need a large screen and a serious FPU... 1024x768 isn't really big enough, so my new notebook will run at least 1280x1024, and higher if I can manage it. I also need plenty of RAM (I'm at 140MB now, and it's marginal) and an OS that doesn't choke on a dozen open apps at once. In short, I need a desktop machine I can carry.

    While I (and the other engineers I know) do use notebook computers on airplanes and in other places away from convenient power, we've found this curious little phenomenon known as extra batteries. It's a small price to pay for the ability to do in the field what I normally do in the office, on my main machine. Then again, many airliners are now equipped with power receptacles -- the ideal solution.

    While I agree than many (even most) notebook users won't need extraordinary measures like water-cooled processors, there are some of us who will gladly accept whatever it takes to keep our powerful machines working. I remember my first high-end notebook, a number of years back: it cost me a cool seven large bills, and it paid for itself in less than a month. Progress for me is whatever it takes to keep that sort of trend going, and Transmeta isn't going to be part of it.

    ---

  • This is the first water-cooled technology to be introduced into laptop computers, a product that industry analysts expect to only get hotter as wattage requirement rise to 20 watts by the end of the year.
    I don't think so. I hope more companies will see the light and produce StrongARM and Crusoe based Laptops. Those chips use much less power and run Linux, so what more do you need?

    Incidentally, it would be rather strange if the laptop was not sealed well anymore after a couple of years of use. One would have to go to tech support and say, "Sir, my laptop is sweating! I am sure it has fever!" ;)

  • However, even (relatively) low-powered components still generate heat, and packing components in more and more densely creates a double whammy by concentrating the heat from all the components in a smaller space and leaving less room for air circulation to cool them. Water-cooling might just be a space-saving measure, not a way to run hyper-fast CPUs.

  • Many benefits (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @03:41AM (#1126417)
    Just think... when the water gets too hot, you can use it to make coffee. As long as you don't have to crack open the CPU to get at it; the silicon adds a bitter aftertaste, particularly on milder blends, such as Colombian. Which I probably spelt wrong.
    Question: would the computer work faster if you used Jolt instead of water?

  • StrongARM / non-FPU'd CPU usage in Laptops... (Score:3)

    by henley ( 29988 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @05:57AM (#1126418) Homepage

    Disagree with conclusions & reasoning re: use of StrongARM or indeed any non-FPU'd processor on laptops.

    Look around you. Who buys laptops or PDAs?:

    • Joe Sixpack with Quake in one hand and a NiMH /LiIon battery pack in the other
    • Chris Corporate with his suit, briefcase, and hard disk full of word documents, emails, and presentations

    I'd suggest that most portable computer devices are bought for "corporate" usage. People buying sub-laptop devices (from WinCE boxen thru Palm and onwards (Psion! Psion! Psion!)) are buying them for applications not games. People buying Laptops are more likely to be corporate purchasers than individuals. Believe me, corporations don't care phht! for quake3 FPS rates.

    So, I'd argue that the market for low-wattage processors (and disks, and displays etc) for the mobile market is FAR greater than the market for high-MFLOPs mobile processors. Personally speaking I'd trade my (company supplied, very flash but HEAVY) Stinkpad for a Crusoe win-Alike or even Psion S7 sized box - as long as it runs my applications. Whether they play games or not is absolutely irrelevent to my or my employer. They're lighter, and they run longer... just the attributes you want in a portable device.

    So this whole water-cooled laptops to me is just plain WRONG. My Laptop is heavy enough and fragile enough as it stands - adding sloshing fluids and fragile radiators to the mass of glass, spinning disks and fans is *not* progress, people.

    A fan. In a laptop. Get this: my battery-powered computer wastes it's power running a fan to stop itself from overheating because of it's power-hungry CPU - what could be more ridiculous? I get 1.5 - 2 hours battery life out of it, and think I've got a winner. It weighs ~3KG.

    Meanwhile, my *personal* PDA, a Psion 5MX, weighs ~0.5KG, runs off 2 x AA batteries for 25 hours, and *still* lets me surf the net, send/receive emails, write word documents, run spreadsheets, organise my life, balance my checkbook etc etc etc.... Guess which one of the above I'd ditch?

    Oh yeah, and a footnote: an FPU is (generally) only useful for 3D games anyway. Strategy, platform, adventure games etc etc etc don't make heavy use of the FPU. I can quite happily play "Monopoly", "The Sims", most of the real-time strategy etc games on my hypothetical non-FPU'd laptop with little to no performance loss compared to a traditional beast. Except of course that my more-modern CPU design will be happily sleeping between turns, and generally saving my batteries for when I really need them.

    Sorry, this has become very long and unstructured. Mark this one up to "passionate response" and move on. Nothing to see here.

  • These are common heat pipes? (Score:3)

    by kurthr ( 30155 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @06:45AM (#1126419)
    "Water cooled" makes it sound like these Toshibas are the Porches of the laptop world (as opposed to the air cooled VWs). What we're probably talking about here are heat pipes based on water (it happens to have a really high heat of vaporization, the right viscosity, and a big change in contact angle- for the meniscus). They've been used in laptops for years, mostly to get heat up on that big fin called a screen that you flip up whenever you use one.

    Check out: http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml [cheresources.com]
    for more info on how these guys work. The key deal is that they don't require a pump to move the water, 'cause the heat does that work itself :^)

    My experience is with the silicon micromachined versions of these. There are all sorts of problems they can develop (angle sensitivity, vapor lock...), but comercial versions work well, and have been around for decades, though they're not as small as you'ld like.

    Currently folks at Stanford are working on electro-osmotic pumps for these exchangers to increase their efficiency/size ratio:
    http://www.stanford.edu/group/micr oheat/hex.html [stanford.edu]
    (use google if stanford fails to load like it did for me).

    enjoy,
    Kurth

  • Hi dummy (Score:3)

    by Pike ( 52876 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @06:48AM (#1126420) Journal
    Business laptops today need high performance power to do presentations through a video projector.

    Someone ought to moderate up that as "funny".

    Have you ever done a presentation through a video projector? One slide at a time. Click, click. Yeah, lots of computing power needed there.

    If you want a gaming computer, pay the extra two thousand clams. On the other hand, if like most people you aren't wasting your time and money, you get the computer that makes the most sense. For people doing actual work, Crusoe gives the best of both worlds, hardly a big sacrifice or tradeoff.

    -JD

  • Other Possibilities (Score:3)

    by alannon ( 54117 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @04:45AM (#1126421)
    Well, as I understood it, the StrongARM chips will NEVER be used in consumer computers (not including palmtops) for the simple fact that the StrongARM family of processors are designed without floating point units. The lack of a floating point unit (meaning all floating point calculations would have to be done in software) would not be all that large of a burdon for typical business applications, but it would make it completely and utterly useless for any sort of game. While gaming is usually not the focus of most laptop owners, I doubt that any laptop without gaming capability would ever become more than a special-use product.
    The Crusoe processor, when released, should allow for designs for laptops and notebook computers that were not availible until now because of power limitations, but I believe that because of the inherent tradeoffs involved in a technology such as Transmeta's code-morphing techniques, the performance of the Crusoe chips will be less constant and reliable than a 'hard-wired' processor, as it were. You may notice that of all the claims that Transmeta has made about the Crusoe chip, first-class performance is NOT one of them. They claim on their web page to support speeds up to 700Mhz in the Crusoe chip, however, as people are beginning to discover, clock speed is never the whole issue. I wish I could remember the original reference, but it has been suggested (and yes, I feel bad for not being able to cite this) that a 700Mhz Crusoe would be equivilent to a 450Mhz PIII (not mobile). While at the moment, this seems like a very nice speed, note that there are NO products using the Crusoe chip today, and PIII 450Mhz machines are availible to purchase today. Assuming that it will be another 3-6 months before a Crusoe laptop hits the market, it's pretty clear that at least in the near term, the Crusoe is going to be a whole level down in the performance race. However, if you NEED 6-8 hours of battery life, the Crusoe chip MAY be the way to go.
    Another good possibility is the Motorola/IBM PowerPC series of processors. The PowerPCs have, in general, been in the 4-6 watt range. The PPC 7400 (AKA G4), according the Motorola's data sheets, eats about 5 watts at 400Mhz, at 'typical' usage. This should get even lower as Motorola moves to a smaller fabrication size. The low power requirements of the PowerPC processors have allowed Apple to be able to produce laptops and desktops with identical processors (and even motherboards! The iMacs and PowerBooks use the same motherboards, with SMALL differences).
    Don't forget, as well, that power consumption of the processor is only one piece of the puzzle in a laptop. With displays getting bigger, rather than smaller, unless the efficiency of LCD displays gets a big boost in the near future, the power consumption of the LCD display is going to get enormous. Don't forget, the difference in area between a 14" and 15" (viewable) screen is not 7%, but around 15%! As it is, in my Apple PowerBook, the screen takes up OVER half of the power consumption. Hard drives, as well, are a factor, as are any other peripherals within the laptop.
    Anyways, hopefully after reading this, you'll realize that the problems in practical portable computing and battery life won't just be solved by dropping in a new, lower powered processor. Wow... I didn't mean for this to ramble so long.

  • Spec sheet doesn't mention this (Score:3)

    by Cy Guy ( 56083 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @03:46AM (#1126422) Homepage Journal
    The (pdf) spec sheet for the 3440ct is here [toshiba.com].

    I don't see anything about being watercooled, though most of the other facts in the article seem right ( less than 1" thick, 500Mhz Mobile PIII, 3.4 lbs)

  • Re:Water cooled parts (Score:3)

    by -brazil- ( 111867 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @04:27AM (#1126423) Homepage
    What else is left to squeeze more power out of a given CPU design besides cooling?

    If you want to have maximum performance, you'll always use cooling on top of whatever else you're doing. Let me illustrate this by a quote:

    I don't build computers, I'm a cooling engineer.

    -- Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Inc.

    The real question is: why would anyone want top performance in a laptop? The damn things are supposed to be reliable and portable, not able to outperform a workstation!

  • Peeing in your pants ... (Score:3)

    by (void*) ( 113680 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @03:51AM (#1126424)
    "Are you incontinent, or it is just your Toshiba leaking?"

  • Re:Other Possibilities (Score:3)

    by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @07:14AM (#1126425)

    Well, as I understood it, the StrongARM chips will NEVER be used in consumer computers (not including palmtops) for the simple fact that the StrongARM family of processors are designed without floating point units. The lack of a floating point unit (meaning all floating point calculations would have to be done in software) would not be all that large of a burdon for typical business applications, but it would make it completely and utterly useless for any sort of game. While gaming is usually not the focus of most laptop owners, I doubt that any laptop without gaming capability would ever become more than a special-use product.

    Wow. I must have been smoking something particularly interesting when I was playing Quake on my StrongARM'd RiscPC. Okay - so it only does 20 fps, but that's not a total failure for a machine doing FP emulation. Or maybe I was completely out of my skull when I was playing HoMM2 on it. Or FreeCiv on my ARM Linux installation. Or the many other games which exist for the StrongARM written either straight in assembler or compiled with gcc/Acorn C/whatever. Don't assume that 'no FPU' == 'no fun'. While I'd love to see a StrongARM with an FPU, I'd probably be more excited to see it teamed up to a DSP chip and DSPs tend to involve less transistors making them ideal for low power consumption (and yes you could use the DSP as a cheap FP emulator as needed).

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • That's about it. Their has no apparent mention of the new model as of yet. [toshiba.com]

    The press release is equally vague about the tech, but does mention that there's a patent pending, and that it's similar to how car engines are cooled. (Isn't that prior art?)
    ---

  • heat pipes ("water cooling") (Score:3)

    by xmatt ( 148567 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @04:40AM (#1126427)
    It appears that the "water cooling" they're talking about is just a heat pipe -- something that has definitely been used in laptops before when fans are unusable.

    The idea behind them is that a small conductive pipe contains a concentric "wick" as well as water vapor. Heat is conducted from the processor to the end of the pipe which then heats the internal vapor and causes it to circulate down the pipe around the wick. The heat is usually sucked out of the pipe at the other end by something big and metal (at least some laptops use metal plates behind the screen .. it sounds like Toshiba just spread the heat out to more places to dissipate it in a small form-factor machine). The water then circulates back to the heat source by capillary action in the wick and starts the cycle over.

    They're pretty neat. I burned my fingers with one when I stupidly stuck it in a cup of coffee once :)

    (first post, btw. woo!)

  • Re:Water cooled parts (Score:3)

    by CosmeticLobotamy ( 155360 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @07:33AM (#1126428)
    I have two things to say.

    A) Computers will be obsolete in seven years, so we only need to keep increasing cooling methods until then.

    B) The best way to get more performance from a processor is to glue more pins to the outside. This tricks the motherboard into thinking that the processor could be doing so much more if only the motherboard had someplace to stick those extra pins. It will usually kick up the bus speed to make itself feel less inferior. Don't worry about the multiplier. It doesn't tell the processor that it changed the bus speed. They are usually too embarrassed to admit they are working hard. Plus, with all those extra pins to dissipate an electric field, you can just throw water on it if it gets too hot.

    I realized how stupid this post is about 1/4 of the way through. I can't stop because I have an itchy posting finger. I'm sorry.

  • Hnnn... (Score:3)

    by ocelotbob ( 173602 ) <ocelot@@@ocelotbob...org> on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @03:43AM (#1126429) Homepage
    Water cooled laptops. I think we're starting to see the death of the x86 architechture in mobiles if we have to resort to the mechanical complexities of a liquid cooling system in order to keep clocks up. Although it's fascinating stuff, I don't want one of those in charge of my data.

  • Re:Dell (Score:3)

    by veratis ( 175959 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @04:18AM (#1126430) Homepage
    Its probably a heat pipe. Heat pipes work by convection, not conduction. See www.heatpipe.com [heatpipe.com] (really!) for a pretty good explaination.

  • Would have to be strong (Score:4)

    by mind21_98 ( 18647 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @03:54AM (#1126431) Homepage Journal
    It would have to be very strong in order to prevent the tube containing the water from breaking and damaging components. You can't fit much in a 0.75in package, including a proper water-cooled processor.

    This Toshiba would have one that's pretty inefficent because there's no indication that there's a refrigerator in it. The water would get hot over time and eventually the processor would be heated up more, not cooled down. Unless there was a slot for you to add more water, that is.

  • ummmm, apple's been doing it for years (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18, 2000 @03:42AM (#1126432)
    my powerbook g3-333 (1999) has a bent tube containting water attached to the underside of the cpu heatsink/shield. I believe it was actually first used in a compaq circa 97. 1st water cooled laptop.... pahleeeze

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